One of the most notable films about dolphins’ rights is ‘Born to be Free’ produced by the Russian Federation and Great Britain (2016). The director of the film is Gayane Petrosyan, the producer is Mike Lerner. The film is notable for its combination of documentary materials and a powerful message of protest.
The story film tells raises the issue of the attitude the ‘average citizen’ has towards circuses and dolphinariums. After all, it’s quite common for us to go to ‘romantic dolphin shows’ with a loved one or a child. Nobody thinks about the reasons why the dolphins actively jump over the ring, do difficult somersaults, carry the artists on them. In a word, they do what is in no way inherent in their natural behavior. ‘Animals are meant to serve men’ – this is how the ‘average citizen’ answers when asked why he or she pays for such entertainment. But what does it really mean?
The attitude described by this phrase is called ‘anthropocentrism’, the belief that man is the king of nature. There are more and more artists in the world who question this point of view. Thanks to watching their films, a growing number of people, albeit far from engaging in practical nature conservation or ecophilosophy, are boycotting dolphinariums.
There are already several films about the keeping of dolphins in captivity. Famous American documentaries ‘The Cove’ (directed by Louie Psihoyos, 2009, Oscar winner) and ‘Blackfish’ (directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, 2013) show cruelty towards marine mammals. A separate genre is represented by the short film ‘Raid on Reykjavik reloaded’ (2012), the feature film ‘How to Change the World’ by Jerry Rothwell (2015) and the series ‘Whale Wars (2008-2015) about environmentalists opposing the hunting of marine mammals.
The movie ‘Born to be Free’ is an example of the work of Russian activists, who in 2016 managed to shoot a film that accused the ‘dolphin’ industry of the Russian Federation. Before them, no one dared to do this.
The movie had been filmed in four seas – Black, White, Okhotsk and South China and in four countries: Russia, Ukraine, China and the United States for 3 years – from summer 2013 to autumn 2016. The official partner of the film is the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).
The international premiere of ‘Born to be Free’ took place in June 2016 at the Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival (UK), where the project was highly praised by international film critics.
Let’s get acquainted with the ‘sea’ heroes of the film – belugas, killer whales and dolphins.
Beluga (white whale) is a species of toothed whales from the narwhal family, a marine mammal that lives in the waters of the Arctic Ocean, the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk. The species is included in the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and has ‘vulnerable’ status. The first notable film about communication between beluga whales and people at the intersection of documentary and fiction was ‘Ceiling’ directed by the Russian Natalia Uglitskikh (2011). In it, freediver Natalya Avseenko prepares to swim in the icy water of the White Sea, accompanied by beluga whales, and succeeds without negative effects on health.
Freediving is diving into the depths of the sea without a source of oxygen, only holding your breath and controlling both body and mind. It’s considered one of the most dangerous sports.
However, as the popularity of freediving is growing, freedivers themselves are increasingly becoming trendsetters for sustainable living. It is not surprising, considering they swim with dolphins and beluga whales in the open sea and communicate with them underwater. Therefore, they perceive it as ignorance and savagery when those beautiful creatures, whose mind is said to be close to human’s mind, are imprisoned for entertainment.
In ‘Ceiling’, Natalya, with the help of scientists, took part in an experiment to study the language, echolocation, and behavior of belugas in the White Sea. The possibilities of human survival in water in extreme conditions were also studied. Natalia set a record for being under ice with a water temperature of – 2 ° C (salt water freezes at negative temperatures) – 10 minutes 40 seconds.
A significant nuance is that those were not free belugas filmed in the movie. Filming with them took place in an open-air cage located in the bay of the White Sea, in a branch of the Utrish Dolphinarium.
Let’s continue our acquaintance. The killer whale or orca is a marine mammal of the order of cetaceans, the suborder of toothed whales, the Delphinidae family. Beluga whales live in the cold waters of the Arctic Ocean, while killer whales live across almost the entire World Ocean. In the twentieth century the species, alongside dolphins, gained popularity in aquariums as ‘entertainers’: it was convenient to arrange a show with them for a mass audience.
However, the conditions of keeping marine mammals do not stand up to criticism: from the temperature of the water, which is higher than their natural to keeping them in cramped containers, practically ‘cans’ with chlorinated water. In addition – the maddening reflection of echoes from the walls, separation from family and tough training. ‘Born free’ highlights precisely such practices.
The film is a journey that takes viewers to the most remote corners of Russia, filming for the first time the shocking ill-treatment of killer whales, dolphins and beluga whales, as well as the facts of corruption at the heart of this brutal international business. The plot is designed as a sort of a journey: three women travel the world and witness the fate of various marine mammals. All three co-authors of the investigatory film are fond of freediving. Let’s turn our attention to the authors.
Gayane Petrosyan is a director, screenwriter, producer and head of the ‘Baikal Cinema’ company.
Tatiana Beley (author of the film idea) is a TV presenter, documentary filmmaker, singer and songwriter, animal rights activist, underwater camerawoman and freediving instructor.
Julia Petrik is the first female freediving champion in Russia and a well-known freediving coach. One of the first freedivers in Russia, she initiated the creation of the Russian branch of the International Freediving Development Association AIDA, and founded of the freediving school Homodelphinus.
The film reveals step by step the evolution of attitudes towards marine mammals in the USSR and in the post-Soviet space. In the “empire of evil” they were regarded as combat units and were taught on the territory of Crimea to undermine enemy ships at the cost of their lives. In the Russian Federation, in the wake of widespread conversion, the former war animals were useful for the entertainment business (under the guise of ‘the survival of the impoverished Russian science’). The footage shows the famous scientist Lev Mukhametov, who in the 90s insisted on the exploitation of cetaceans for commercial shows. This practice originated in the 90s and is still alive today. However, the film begins with the ‘homeland’ of this approach, the Utrish Marine Station of the Russian Academy of Sciences, founded in 1978. The station is located on the Black Sea coast near Cape Maly Utrish.
The plot of ‘Born to be Free’ emanates from a scandalous situation in 2013: a ban on the export of 18 belugas from the Russian Federation to the United States. 18 animals were caught in the Far East in the Sea of Okhotsk for the Georgia aquarium. The activists managed to get a ban on the import of mammals into the United States, but this was only the beginning of a tragic situation. For several years, white whales were locked in concrete reservoirs of the aforementioned Utrish research station. The famous actress Kim Bassinger wrote a letter to the President of the Russian Federation about this situation. The media put a spotlight on her request to release 18 belugas. The future film creators learned about this and started their investigation. The women decided to visit the Utrish sea station. They managed to get there with a camera and capture the images of large white whales in small containers. This shocked the authors and prompted them to continue filming.
Why was it impossible to release animals after the ban on their import to the United States? ‘A team of experts was formed, we were ready to make a rehabilitation center for them, even Pamela Anderson joined in and started raising money for the ransom,’ says Gayane.
‘At first from the Russian side we were told that it was a matter of money. But then the Georgia Aquarium announced that it would not let them back into the sea. They put their veterinarians to work and drew up a whole theory claiming the animals would die. It was refuted by all the experts we consulted. It seems to me that it was important for them – to keep their status, because if they conceded to the animal rights activists, it could undermine their business, since now everything is based on the fact that they are high-class, that their conditions are better than living in the sea.’
Meanwhile, white whales, harmless by nature, began to kill each other: ‘Belugas from our experience of communication and according to expert opinion are very kind creatures. It’s impossible to imagine that in nature they could inflict injuries, pull out pieces of meat from each other, this is nonsense. Even if something like this happened, there is always somewhere to go in the ocean. This, of course, speaks volumes about their conditions in captivity’, – explained Gayane. The story of these belugas ended tragically: four of them died, the rest were sold to aquariums in China and Japan.
After visiting the Utrish station, the puzzle is put together. The viewer, together with the authors, discovers a terrible reality of the exploitation of sea creatures. The film continues with footage of two killer whales kept in old rusty containers in Moscow. The animals were kept in complete isolation in an extremely small space while their owners had been waiting for the aquarium to open for over a year.
During the investigation, the directors entered a confrontation with the dolphin business, which, as it turned out, makes fabulous amounts of money from the suffering of animals. Gayane says: ‘… there were dangerous moments when we were directly threatened during the filming, even with physical harm’. Turned out that the Russian Federation is the only country at the moment where beluga whales and killer whales are caught and then sold to aquariums around the world. At the same time, out of a hundred captured animals an average of 50 end up dying. This is the price of keeping beluga whales in the aquariums of the USA, Canada, China and other countries, which the show visitors do not know about.
As for killer whales, the price of one whale sold to China reaches $ 10 million. As a rule, several are sold at once. And therefore, the capture of these animals increases annually.
Dolphinariums are opening up throughout Russia to support the demand for new killer whales, dolphins and beluga whales. In Moscow, Moskvarium opened in 2015 as the first in the country’s growing industry. This business involves:
- the cruel capture of mammals;
- separating them from close-knit and well-established families;
- containers in which they cannot swim;
- the accumulation of animals in a very confined space, which leads to violent attacks and deaths;
- painful and often unprofessional transportation in contaminated containers for thousands of kilometers, when animals get sick and die before arrival;
- lack of veterinary specialists and adequate health care;
- and finally, daily training based on the constant feeling of hunger and forcing animals to change their behavior in order to perform tricks for humans.
All of this is in critically small reservoirs and basins that are too warm (for beluga whales and killer whales), too chlorinated, too polluted and are inconsistent with the biological needs of cetaceans.
Gayane says: ‘Beluga whales, killer whales and dolphins are very similar to humans. They, like us, are social animals, who build families for life, only their groups are more complex. The loss of a child is a psychological stress for them, just as life in captivity is.
Children are caught for the aquariums. Their psyche has not yet matured, so it is easier to train them. It [the cub] will never see its family again. In fact, the animal is put in prison, where it must live on dead fish, which is unnatural food for them, because they hunt for living fish all their life. So, it must live for a piece of this dead fish for the rest of its life in a prison without a family and an ocean, inhale bleach and perform stupid stunts so as not to starve to death.’
Marine mammals swim hundreds of kilometers a day and dive tens of meters deep. Yet after catching, they are enclosed in the concrete walls of the pools.
Gayane continues: ‘Visitors to dolphinariums think the animals are happy. After all, they play, have fun and make funny sounds. People think they are smiling. Of course, these are not smiles, this is the structure of the face. Even in moments when they swim up to people and somehow try to communicate, it comes from loneliness and fear. If you put a person in a lonely cell and periodically let him out into the yard, and a guard approaches him, then, probably, he will be happy to exchange at least a couple of words, because he is going crazy with horror and loneliness. I saw dolphins in a terrible depression, hanging in one place for hours. They did nothing, just hung with their heads down.
Dolphinarium employees tend to say that the life expectancy of belugas in captivity is longer than in the wild. But that is not true! We calculated ourselves, kept our statistics on the deaths of beluga whales around the world in dolphinariums, and according to all these figures and data, life expectancy is two times less than in the wild’.
The topic of the film is still relevant today. There are about 350 dolphinariums and more than a hundred oceanariums in the world. China plans to open similar amusement parks in every city. But there are also positive examples. For example, Costa Rica was one of the first to ban dolphinariums and aquariums. Great Britain followed the same path. The country’s dolphinariums are still home for the last dolphins, but it is prohibited at the state level to open new dolphinariums. In other countries, however, visitors still carry their money, thus encouraging the capture of wild animals.
The film was created by freedivers, so there is a lot of beautiful underwater filming, evidence of communication between free dolphins and divers. The film also includes rare underwater footage of wild dolphins and their interaction with people, filmed by Julia and Tatiana in different seas and oceans.
Interesting facts: world-class scientists and public figures took part in the film: Maria Vorontsova (RF), Naomi Rose (USA), Samuel Hang (China) and others. Aleksey Yablokov, the leading figure of Russian environmental science and environmental policy, also participated. He was interviewed by the film’s crew in February 2016. This is the last appearance of the biologist on the screen, he passed away on January 10, 2017. In the film doctor explains the brain structure of marine mammals. It turns out that dolphins and whales have parts that humans do not have: ‘As such, these parts of the brain are responsible for something that we do not have, and that we do not understand and will never understand, no matter how hard we try,’ sums up Gayane Petrosyan.
Producer Mike Lerner took the film beyond the narrow niche framework of eco-cinema and made it an event in the international documentary mainstream.
It is noteworthy that ‘Born to be Free’ was funded by activists, not just one rich patron. The financial side of the production involved ‘partisan’ crowdfunding of caring citizens who privately donated money to cover travels of the participants in the investigation, ‘official’ crowdfunding on the Indiegogo international platform, supported by 400 shareholders from two dozen countries, investments by Channel4 Television Corporation, one of the most reputable media groups in Europe brought in by producer Mike Lerner. Gayane Petrosyan and Tatiana Beley also financed the project.
In the process of raising funds for the post-production of the film, the authors described their goals as follows:
- induce people to refuse attending shows with the participation of marine mammals, so as not to sponsor this cruel industry;
- change the public perception of oceanariums so that they become a wild anachronism;
- offer humane alternatives so that humans can interact with dolphins and whales without any violence.
Tatiana Belei reports: ‘After watching, viewers opened their eyes to this industry, they stopped visiting such shows. And we went further by opening the Dolphin Rescue Center ‘Delfa’, the main goal of which is the rehabilitation and release of dolphins after life in captivity. We help dolphins and the sea as much as we can: we organize mobile teams to help wild cetaceans, we conduct scientific research, educational activities, we keep records and statistics of those who were thrown out and killed in order to determine the causes of their death. Our great desire is to build a stationary center’.
The message of ‘Born to be Free’ is clear: a person who previously thought that dolphins were ‘smiling’, ‘made to amuse us’, and that money could be spent showing a family a dolphin show, should give up such practice after watching. Films like these are designed to evoke empathy combined with an analysis of what is happening, and we must be grateful that they are being made. So this movie is a worthy start to get engaged with the topic of ecology.
